Becoming Machinic Virtuosos: Guitar Hero, Rez, and
Multitudinous Aesthetics
Henry Adam Svec
Faculty of Information and Media Studies
University of Western Ontario
[email protected]
Abstract
Media scholars Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford view digital play as a complex, conflicted
site on the terrain of global capital; although seemingly “one-dimensional” diversions in many
instances, video games also constitute a space where the virtual can be actualized and where radical
subjectivities can be collaboratively improvised (2005a; 2005b). Drawing from de Peuter and DyerWitheford’s work, this paper explores a gaming trend that has not yet been critically examined – the
incorporation by recent titles of musical performance. The wildly popular Guitar Hero and the lesser
known but critically acclaimed Rez serve as examples of digital-musical play; my paper argues that
both games offer virtual “lines of flight,” however humble.
“I’m pretty up-front about video games – I play an hour a day. Frankly, I feel more
awkward talking about going to the gym [...]. It’s called the information age for a
reason.” (Owen Pallet as cited in Carpenter, 2006)
“Everything becomes possible the moment one allows the assemblage to escape from
energetico-spatio-temporal co-ordinates. And, here again, we need to rediscover a
manner of Being – before, after, here and everywhere else – without being, however,
identical to itself; a processual, polyphonic Being singularisable by infinitely
complexifiable textures, according to infinite speeds which animate its virtual
compositions.” (Guattari, 1995, p. 51)
Introduction
Recently a handful of indie musicians, working in a variety of different genres, have
demonstrated the deep interrelatedness of popular music and digital play. I will list merely a few
examples. The highly acclaimed violinist/song-writer Owen Pallet (who illegally performs under the
name Final Fantasy, and who fascinatingly began his professional career composing for video
games) looked to Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) mythologies and Japanese Role-Playing Games
(JRPGs) for inspiration on his latest disc, He Poos Clouds. Jim Guthrie used a Playstation game to
back up his voice and guitar on his intricately arranged album, Morning Noon Night. The post-punk
group All-Purpose Voltage Heroes regularly and sincerely incorporate a cover of the theme from
Nintendo’s Punchout into their live show. And in the world of electronica, a recent collection of
Kraftwerk covers called 8-bit Operators was performed entirely on hacked, vintage 8-bit machines.
This rich cross-pollination can also be seen in several recent video games. In titles such as PaRappa
the Rapper, Guitar Hero, and Rez – which rely heavily on the hip-hop, rock, and dance music
traditions, respectively – “to play” is either to perform, compose, or improvise musical works.
Furthermore, underneath these aesthetic and avant-garde exchanges, extensive cross-promotional
campaigns have blurred the lines of the game and music industries entirely (EA Sports’ use of pop
music, for example).
Despite all this, music in digital games has been under-examined in the academy. First, aside
from Jacob Smith’s (2004) study, popular music journals have generally ignored the musicality of
video games. Despite the important work being done on the discursive nature of “authenticity”
(Keightley, 2000; Moore, 2002), scholars in the discipline tend to look past the industry’s own
practices of legitimation and exclusion in this regard. Smith’s article “I Can See Tomorrow In Your
Dance” (2004) is a thoughtful way into one aspect of games and music; here Smith explores the
complex relationships between Kareoke culture, the glocalization of hip-hop in Japan, and the
popular game Dance Dance Revolution. On the other hand, the topic has attracted attention at a few
venues for video game scholarship. Robert Bowen (2004) has presented intriguing research on the
inherent musical events in Atari 2600 games, which he structurally likens to ersatz jazz
compositions. Zach Whalen (2004) has explored how music and sound drive the narrative and ludic
dimensions of such games as Super Mario Bros. As well, Matthew Belinkie (1999) has offered a
survey of the history of music in games, with a focus on ‘canonical’ composers. These are invaluable
contributions to the slowly burgeoning field, but there is much more work to be done.
The current paper will examine one aspect of digital games and music that I see as a novel
and necessary way into this fertile area. Robert Bowen has shown, using Atari games as a case study,
that to play a video game is to play music. I will explore, then, two recent Playstation 2 titles, Guitar
Heroi and Rez, which integrate this truism into their game-play.
It is my objective, however, to go beyond the musicological and semiotic planes of analysis
at which much of the work has thus far stopped. Rather than merely analyzing keys, harmonies, or
diegetic cues, this paper will tackle what I find to be a more pressing question: how has the
performance of musical events been incorporated into digital play? Although the scope here is
limited to primarily ludic-aesthetic concerns, the implications will be ethico-political and
‘transversal.’ Following the groundbreaking lead of Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford
(2005a; 2005b), this paper will consider Guitar Hero and Rez as virtual-aesthetic tools by which the
sovereignty of “Empire” (Hardt & Negri, 2000) can be challenged. Through their engagement with
the politics of immaterial labour, and through their foregrounding of affected/affecting minds and
bodies, these musical games urge the player(s) and audience to grasp the immanence and
immeasurableness of human creativity.
Empire, Immaterial Labour, and Machinic Virtuosity
Before analyzing the games themselves, I will briefly explain the theoretical tradition that
informs this exploration. “Empire” is the name given by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to a
qualitatively new paradigm of social control and exploitation that reigns over the postmodern global
economy (2000). For the task at hand, the most germane characteristic of the paradigm shift from
modern disciplinarity (exemplified by Ford’s factories) to postmodern Empire (exemplified by the
precarious labour of the networked video game industry [De Peuter & Dyer-Witheford, 2005a]) is
the proliferation of modes of increasingly immaterial labour (Hardt & Negri, 2000). The immaterial
labourer toils to make not durable goods but immaterial ones, including “services, cultural products,
knowledge, and communication” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 290). In other words, much like the
avatars of Guitar Hero, immaterial labourers perform for capital. Paolo Virno’s definition of the
virtuoso emphasizes the performative aspects of immaterial labour:
First of all, theirs is an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in
itself, without objectifying itself into an end product, without settling into a “finished
product,” or into an object which would survive the performance. Secondly, it is an activity
which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience.
(2004, p. 52)
Although there is a broad spectrum along which various immaterial work falls – from
rudimentary data inputting to work in the entertainment industries (Hardt & Negri, 2000) – it
necessarily requires the presence of others and finds its own purpose in itself; it is thus inherently
performative.
Immaterial labour’s primacy in the contemporary global economy is paradoxical. First, the
capture of affective, social, and creative labour by capital marks the point at which exploitation
pervades not only socio-economic institutions, but the very bodies, minds, and relationships that
constitute life itself; creativity per se becomes subsumed under the laws of exchange and measure
(Hardt & Negri, 2000). As Virno puts it, “It is here that the virtuoso begins to punch a time card”
(2004, p. 56). More theoretically, Hardt and Negri explain the axiomatic under which virtuosity has
fallen prey: “the general equivalence of money brings all elements together in quantifiable,
commensurable relations” (2000, p. 327). And yet, by mobilizing creativity in total for the pursuit of
profit, Empire also mobilizes the movement of desires and possibilities which compromise its very
sovereignty: “today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks. In the expression
of its own creative energies, immaterial labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of
spontaneous and elementary communism” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 294). The political body that is
captured by Empire, and which paradoxically also opposes it and overflows it, is named “multitude”
(Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 60-66)
The work of Deleuze and Guattari (1995) illuminates the tensions between the immanent,
desiring-creativity of the multitude and the transcendent plane of Empire’s axiomatic, whereby
existence includes only that which can turn a profit. For Deleuze and Guattari, the entirety of history
and existence is constituted by an analogous battle between “machines”2 and “structures”:
[Structure] is haunted by a desire for eternity. The machine, on the contrary, is shaped by a
desire for abolition. Its emergence is doubled with breakdown, catastrophe – the menace of
death. It possesses a supplement: a dimension of alterity which it develops in different
forms. This alterity differentiates it from structure, which is based on a principle of
homeomorphism. (Guattari, 1995, p. 37)
Structures – of which money itself is an example – impose limits on the processual
becoming-beyond that is desiring-creation. Machines, on the other hand, do not pin down the flux of
becoming and potentiality through signifiers, limits, or borders (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983).
Aesthetic machines in particular are subjectivity-producing assemblages that break through
structure: “[Performance art] has the advantage of drawing out the full implications of this extraction
of intensive, a-temporal, a-spatial, a-signifying dimensions from the semiotic net of quotidianity”
(Guattari, 1995, p. 90). Aesthetic machines resist measurement, exchange, and the commodity form:
they affirm only productive desire.
Insofar as virtuosity is concerned, then, one type of aesthetic machine might free up the
timecard-punching immaterial labourer. This might involve the disruption of the structures of
exchange and measure which govern the virtuoso under imperial sovereignty. To put it another way,
an aesthetic machine might reveal as contingent (and thus unnatural and unnecessary) capital’s
extraction of ‘unproductive’ labour into surplus value. Guattari himself has beautifully and
bewilderingly described such a machine:
Strange contraptions, you will tell me, these machines of virtuality, these blocks of mutant
percepts and affects, half-object half-subject, already there in sensation and outside
themselves in fields of the possible. They are not easily found at the usual marketplace for
subjectivity and maybe even less at that for art; yet they haunt everything concerned with
creation, the desire for becoming-other [...]. (1995, p. 92)
So, “machinic virtuosity” is a motley, half-borrowed concept; it describes a performance
which breaks beyond measure and affirms creative potential. A machinic virtuoso is an immaterial
labourer who forges a way against Empire’s axiomatic of exchange.
With machinic virtuosity in mind, the representation of performance in popular culture –
what it means to be a virtuoso, to work creatively – deserves closer interrogation, for media and
culture are both the subjectivity-producers of Empire and the means by which Empire can be
challenged (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Hardt & Negri, 2004). Games in particular, as de Peuter and
Dyer-Witheford have argued, offer a means for subversion and subjective experimentation contra
Empire: “Interactive games are a ludic exploration of the possibilities of collective human
development, up to and including fundamental socio-economic, environmental, and biological
alterations” (2005a, http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/depeuter_dyerwitheford.html). Although it
could be argued that all video games are inherently performative, and so all necessarily engage to
some degree with the representation of immaterial labour, the recent genre of musical games such as
Guitar Hero are overtly so: they beg to be played in front of others. Rez is lesser known for its
performative dimension, but a unique vibrator-adaptor included with some versions also welcomes
witnesses. Further, being ‘musical’ games – which, as such, narrate immaterial labour and the
processes by which it is measured or captured – their stories and rules deal explicitly with the
tensions between capital and creativity.
So, to the task at hand: Are Guitar Heroes and Rez-heads (allegorically speaking) captured
immaterial labourers, machinic virtuosos, or both?
Guitar Hero
Before plugging in our virtual axes, it might be helpful to consider the traditional electric
guitar. With the help of electronic processing equipment, which can infinitely alter the signal of the
instrument, an electric guitar can emit a multitudinous array of tones and timbres. I do not mean to
fetishize the tonal range of the guitar here. Even if a player were somehow limited to one string, or
even one note, virtually endless sonic possibilities can be made actual by changing one’s attack or
rhythm. This infinite palette, of course, has been used to produce ingeniously mutant universes of
sound and texture. Such performances do not need to be authoritatively creative in the Modernist
sense in order to be aesthetic machines, for challenging musical assemblages can be found in cover
songs perhaps as easily as in ‘original’ works. An example of a machinic cover might be Jimmy
Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”:
When [Hendrix] pushes the song in the direction of electronic noise, as he does once again
on “rocket’s red glare,” the effect is less of a departure from the original melody than an
extension of it, albeit a severely disorienting extension [...]. By the time the guitarist
converts the single note of “free” into a shrill bit of feedback that descends into a miasma
of sound, one has the sense of having heard not just a rendition of the national anthem but a
full-fledged reinvention of it, such that the original can never be heard quite the same way
again [...]. Hendrix translated the fractitiousness of the war at home and abroad and the
damage it did to American patriotism into a war between music and noise that was at once
a supreme act of defamiliarization and a stunning political critique. (Waksman, 1999, p.
171)
This analysis of Hendrix’s performance easily recalls Guattari’s notion of machinic
chaosmosis, whereby limits and borders break down through aesthetically-induced, machinic
rupture. As Waksman points out, even the original composition crumbles at the hands of the
guitarist: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the musician, the audience, and the guitar he holds all
become other than themselves.
Guitar Hero's rendition of music-making – of immaterial labour – is of another breed
entirely. Like Hendrix’s performance of the American national anthem, all music-making in the
game is of cover songs. That is, the player does not compose music per se, but works to recreate the
compositions of others in a ‘live’ setting. Unlike Hendrix, however, the player of Guitar Hero is
unable to alter the guitar-shaped controller’s signal, or even hit a wrong note (if they wish to remain
playing the game). As the simplified scores of hit rock songs scroll towards the player, s/he must
respond by precisely ‘fretting’ and ‘strumming’ the song’s repeating patterns. When the player
succeeds, the guitar track of the song is phased into the mix. Many have found this to be affectively
enjoyable: to the player who has mastered the game’s songs, it feels as though s/he is actually
accompanying the virtual band. When the player misses a note, however, or frets the wrong position
on the neck, the guitar’s channel in the overall mix is disrupted. In place of the crisp sustain of a
successfully strummed phrase, the player is punished with a shriek of atonal feedback. If too many
notes are missed, the song quickly comes to an end. Imagine if Hendrix’s creative deviations from
“The Star-Spangled Banner” had been panned out of Woodstock’s PA system! Such is the condition
of musical production in Guitar Hero. The player can either conform to the game’s logic by
reproducing the requisite hits, which are presented as measurable, stable, complete, and eternal
(structural), or not play at all.
The player/avatar’s production of affect, the player’s music-making, is comprehensively
tabulated by the game. Points are won by the successful completion of the measures which unfold
during play. In the story mode, these points are converted into virtual capital; as players ‘win’ gigs,
they gain money which they can then exchange for nicer guitars, newer clothes, and so forth. This
accompanying narrative perhaps illustrates Empire’s capture of human virtuosity. What is more,
Guitar Hero transposes capital’s suspicion of that which is beyond measure onto the act of musical
performance itself. The play of harmonies sanctioned by the game is exchanged for money, but all
tones and rhythms that fall outside Guitar Hero's system of measure are not saleable. They are not
even audible. This disdain for immanent creativity pervades the entire corpus of the player. As the
essentially unalterable scores are imposed, the rhythm of her/his body becomes subject to the
incessant (albeit virtual) conversion of affect-production to profit. The player of Guitar Hero – if
s/he wants to stay in the game – must sway and strum to the metronome of the cash nexus.
Some will suggest that the units of the game that I have been analyzing actually implicate
Guitar Hero as producer of a newer variety of the one-dimensional subjectivity so well described by
the Frankfurt School, for whom “to be entertained means to be in agreement” (Adorno &
Horkheimer, 2002, p. 115). This is how critics such as Julian Stallabrass (1996) might choose to
consider the game, which does seem to simulate and naturalize the capturing of creative labour.
Guitar Hero, perhaps like many other video games (cf. Stallabrass, 1996), might be an example of a
cultural product that re-creates the logic of social discipline through its very consumption and
enjoyment. It is possible that some players will be oppressed by the game. I think it is more likely,
however, that the game’s overtly rigid, one-dimensional treatment of musical creativity will be
experienced as a challenging critique of the culture industry’s finite subjectivity-production. The
game’s cut-scenes alone are saturated with ironic references to the implicit sameness and profitseeking imperatives of the culture industries. Before the first gig in the story-mode of Guitar Hero
has even begun, for instance, the player is notified that s/he has landed that all-important first
sponsorship deal! With a critical flair akin to the biting film This is Spinal Tap, Guitar Hero
satirically foregrounds the capturing of creativity. Rather than simply ideologically perpetuating
imperial logic and the structure of exchange, the game’s treatment of musicianship begs the player to
imagine and perform something else: something other.
Although I suggest above that the game’s imposition of meter and exchange disciplines the
player’s entire body to accept the logic of Empire’s axiomatic – and on one hand it does just that –
the fact that many casual players cannot ‘keep up’ seems to be one of its most enjoyable and
community-engendering qualities. To laugh at the inability of newcomers to harness their arms and
rhythm according to the game’s logic is to point to worlds beyond structure, measure and exchange.
Even the seasoned veteran, perhaps led by the controller’s strap to stand or move, implicates
universes of desire and creativity through their affected and affecting performance, which
necessarily overflows the game’s point system. This potential fostering of machinic virtuosity is
engendered also by the controller’s whammy-bar. The analog-like apparatus allows the player’s tone
and its visual representation to be variably altered throughout play. For the whammy bar to be
employable, the correct pattern on the guitar’s neck must be strummed first (thus to use it at all, one
must partake in the rigid play as discussed above); whammy bar play is also captured and measured
by the game’s point system. Still, the whammy bar might be considered as a site of creative conflict
– a tool around which the sheer joys and desires of performance square off against the numbers and
values imposed upon the player.
Guitar Hero's production of desiring-other, its virtual engagement with machinic virtuosity,
has also begun to express itself outside the consumer-ready through various modifications and hacks.
YouTube abounds with various clips of people playing new, unauthorized tracks. This shows that
some have been inspired, in a modest way perhaps, to reclaim “The Common,” as Hardt and Negri
propose to call it (2000, p. 300). More interestingly, some particularly determined players have
begun to mechanically transform the game’s guitar-shaped controller into a digital instrument that
can be used outside of the game’s confines. Travis Chen explains the impetus behind his own such
mod:
I really would like to first say that I am in no way the first person to have the idea to utilize
the Guitar Hero controller outside of the game. There have been a variety of people that
have done equally cool work using the Guitar Hero controller. A great summary of these
various projects can be found here, http://www.pixelsumo.com/post/guitar-hero-hacks. I
especially like the mod that incorporates the buttons into a real guitar! Personally, I really
wanted to incorporate the Guitar Hero controller with a live band. (in Kuo, 2006)
The ‘one-dimensional’ Guitar Hero, rather than oppressing its players, has urged (perhaps
forced) them to create beyond the boundaries it playfully imposes. It is possible that the next batch
of Hendrixes will be playing, or even just making, Guitar Hero mods.
Rez
If Guitar Hero ironically enacts the grim realities of cultural production under capitalism –
where richly creative bodies and minds struggle to perform in the narrow way that the logic of the
game understands – Rez, on the other hand, can be read as an outright simulation of machinic
virtuosity. First, I should make it clear that Rez is not a ‘music’ game per se. Indeed, it is hard to fit
Rez into any genre, for the strange work is equal parts side-scroller, 3D shooter, digital music
sampler, and mechanical sex toy. It is perhaps for this reason that the game has attracted much
popular and academic attention (Wolf, 2003; Wark, 2007). Regarding Rez’s inherent music-making,
however, it seems that not much has been said. Eugenie Shinkle (2005) has written on the game’s
highly affective play, including its aural properties, but her brief analysis is situated within a larger
argument against the validity of the Albertian perspective in game studies. Certainly, the bizarre
game lends itself well to all sorts of discussions. Of sole interest to us here, however, will be the
rhythmic soundtrack with which the player can intuitively collaborate.
Rez’s world is one in which information and knowledge have literally overloaded the AI
governance network, ironically titled “Eden.” The player’s mission is to gain access to the center, a
quest which involves maneuvering around and killing a seemingly endless barrage of viruses and
firewalls. Player production of percussive sound in Rez is a byproduct of defensive counter-attacks
against the enemy viruses in the game; ostensibly, the primary objective in Rez is to defend the
avatar, not to execute digital paradiddles or flans. Still, an infinitely complex, improvisatory musical
work develops as one plays the game. When the player presses the action button (which is most
immediately used to shoot oncoming foes), a percussive sound is triggered. As the player defends the
avatar by targeting the approaching enemies, a rhythmic collage permutates and develops alongside
the electronica soundtrack, which necessarily becomes collaboration between the game and the
player.
Notably, although the visual outcome of game-play in Rez is tabulated, the aural performance
is not. To overshoot a virus in the game may be to score a miss as such, but the missed shot will
nonetheless trigger a percussive sound. As I was pleasantly surprised to notice upon my first
experience with the game, missed shots actually produce an interesting variation in timbre. Thus,
complex rhythmic patterns can arise by alternating between hitting and missing the targets as the
player desires. Further, although it is possible to ‘die’ in the standard play-mode of Rez, which
temporarily puts an end to the music-making, an equally enticing mode of play is ‘traveling.’ In this
more playful, exploratory version of the game, the avatar is not subject to damage; while ‘traveling,’
the player is free to experience the game’s visual and sonic virtual-landscapes.
Rez is a musical-aesthetic machine that allows the player – and audience, who can ‘listen’
along via an adaptor-vibrator – to behold the processual activity of rhythm. The vibrator even comes
with a washable sleeve, allowing it to be used in performances I can only ask my reader to imagine.
Although not to the same degree as Guitar Hero3, this game, too, foregrounds performativity by
urging one to play music in front of, and along with, others. Yet, it does so without quantifying the
experience, which consequently becomes purely virtuosic: a melding of poesis and praxis less the
structure of exchange. Stamatia Portanova (2007) has written, through a Deleuzian lens, on the
differences between meter and rhythm. The former is akin to Guattari’s structure, the latter a proper
machine:
Rather than metricising a reiteration of steps, rhythm delineates the elusive character of the
body, its molecular self-differentiation, its continuous dis- and re-appearing after all
perceptual and spatial changes. At this level, human perception, sensori-motor coordination
and cognition are indistinguishable from trance and hallucination [...]. Through rhythm,
dance dissolves the system of power and dominance which organises it as an expression
and communication of physical potency and as a tool for social control. (Portanova, 2004)
To play Guitar Hero is to march (off-beat, perhaps, always a little off-beat) in a sardonically
spectacular parade; to play Rez, on the other hand, is to dance to the rhythm of the multitude.
Whereas Guitar Hero satirically simulates the commodification of the virtuoso and the tyrannies of
meter and structure, Rez virtually frees the player-performer to create sounds beyond measure.
Conclusion
Some may ask, “how can electronic ‘art’ be considered in the same breath as ‘multitude?’”
Yet, as Guattari has suggested and as de Peuter’s and Dyer-Witheford’s work affirms, social and
ecological troubles cannot be considered separately from the other universes of thought and action
which they necessarily implicate. As Guattari states, “Now more than ever, nature cannot be
separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the
mecanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think
‘transversally’” (2000, p. 43). Video games are key agents in the postmodern production of
subjectivity, both the structural and the machinic types, and video games are at once “games of
Empire” and “games of multitude” (De Peuter & Dyer-Witheford, 2005a; 2005b). I have attempted
to uncover two of the potentially multitudinous varieties. Under Empire, musical-aesthetic machines
will not necessarily be found at the record shop, nor will radical, challenging performance art
necessarily be found, for example, at the Dada cabarets of yore: “[Virtual machines] are not easily
found at the usual marketplace for subjectivity and maybe even less at that for art; yet they haunt
everything concerned with creation, the desire for becoming-other [...]” (Guattari, 1995, p. 92). I
propose, then, that we give further “transversal” attention to the musical properties of video games,
and vice-versa.
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Footnotes
1
My analysis is equally applicable to Guitar Hero 1 and 2, for their game-play is identical. For the sake of ease, I
will write “Guitar Hero.” Also, although I spent time primarily with the Playstation 2 version of Guitar Hero 1, my
analysis seems to be valid for all incarnations of the game. Much of it seems to be extendable also to Rock Band.
2
“Machine,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, describes an ontological category that includes everything that
moves, everything that desires, everything that resists limits and borders, everything that engenders possibility:
“Everything is a machine” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 2). Thus the term in their lexicon provocatively departs
from common usage.
3
Guitar Hero can accommodate audiences of varying size, whereas Rez’s audience seems best limited to one or
two. Further, Guitar Hero’s more mainstream soundtrack is perhaps less exclusive than Rez’s, which is primarily
targeted at rave and trance music cultures. So, although Rez grapples more overtly with the former half of “machinic
virtuosity,” Guitar Hero is more concerned with the latter.